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Recordings

Hyperion’s Strauss Lieder series is fast becoming a worthy successor to the seminal Schubert and Schumann Lieder sets on the label. This fourth volume features a veteran of these recordings, the great British baritone Christopher Maltman. Roger Vigno ...» More

'Christine Brewer … combine opulent, blazing tone, fearless top notes and surprising agility' (The Daily Telegraph)'Christine Brewer in magisterial voice … a major project, beautifully performed and presented' (The Independent)» More

'This remarkable German soprano takes us on some giddy flights with superb breath control and a quite amazing concentration of vocal energy. But she n ...'It's hard to dispute Roger Vignoles's claim that Anne Schwanewilms is 'a great singing actress'. That's clear in every song, where both the overall t ...» More

In the shade I saw
A little flower growing
Gleaming like stars,
Lovely as eyes.

I was going to pick it,
When gently it said:
Must I be picked
To wilt and die?

I dug it out
With all its roots,
Took it to the garden
Of my pretty home.

And planted it again
In a quiet corner;
Where it still grows
And continues to bloom.

English: Richard Stokes

Strauss always admitted to feeling inhibited in the presence of great poetry, which accounts for his very small number of settings of writers like Goethe and Heine, and his almost total avoidance of texts set by Schubert, Schumann or Wolf. In the case of Gefunden however, he was able to warm to the marital symbolism of Goethe’s poem, written for the poet’s wife Christiane shortly after their silver wedding, and fashion from it one of the gentlest and loveliest of all the songs he dedicated to his own wife Pauline. Felicitous touches abound—the gentle tolling quavers of the piano part, the subtle key change on ‘Im Schatten sah ich’, the momentary pause at ‘Ich wollt es brechen’ and the remote key in which the flower speaks, the left hand’s doubling of the voice at ‘Ich grubs mit allen’ and ‘Und pflanzt es wieder’, as if digging into the soil, and the benediction of the final playout.

When I question you, for whom life blooms:
O tell, O tell me how the poppy-field glows!
The red poppy-field, how it rejoices and laughs:
My path is death and my night is eternal.
Many a misfortune strikes humans hard,
Who bears so much, no longer knows distress.
He staggers blind through bright sunlit meadows
And feels for paths now buried under earth.
I dream of suns, stretch wide my arms,
I’d like to reach beyond the dark wall,
I’d like to reach through layers of shadow
Into red poppies and streaming golden light.
A shimmer still flickers from former times,
Longing kept watch in dead eyes,
And aware of the glory of light,
I walk so abandoned through night and void.
Whether I encounter joy or sorrow on my journey,
My curse is dead, and dead too my blessing.

Rarely if ever sung in the concert hall, Blindenklage is a fine vehicle for a dramatically inclined singer. It is conceived on a truly operatic scale, the piano part eloquent with orchestral gestures, in particular a plangent woodwind-like motif not unlike that which also characterizes the first of the Ophelia-Lieder—both harmonically and in its jagged, wide-ranging vocal line it looks forward to Salome and Elektra. Henckell provided Strauss with some of his most serious texts (including of course the impressive Ruhe, meine Seele!) and this is no exception. Its subject matter is virtually without precedent, apart from Schubert’s Der blinde Knabe, whose opening line ‘O say! What is that thing called light?’ Henckell seems to echo—‘O sag’ mir, sage, wie das Mohnfeld glüht!’ But where Schubert’s blind boy finds some consolation—‘While thus I sing, I am a king / although a poor blind boy’—Henckell offers no such reprieve, and Strauss is equally uncompromising.

Blindenklage was dedicated to Strauss’s mother, together with the four songs of Op 56 that follow it. Perhaps it was intended as a reflection on advancing old age. Certainly read as such, the music rings not just with pathos on the part of the singer, but with compassion on the part of the composer.

I lay my head on the ship’s bench,
At last my burning brow is chilled!
Ah, how sweetly my heart grows cool!
How gently joy and pain are stilled!
Over my head the funnel’s black smoke
Curls and sways in the gusting wind.
First on this side and then on that
The boat puts in at many a port:
In the faint light of the ship’s lantern
A shadow disembarks and no one boards.
Only the helmsman’s awake, on his feet!
Only the wind, which blows through my hair!
Pain and pleasure die a gentle death.
The dark boat bears a slumbering form.

English: Richard Stokes

In the three-year gap that produced Salome Strauss composed two songs for basso profundo with orchestra, Das Thal and Der Einsame Opus 51. For Im Spätboot he returned to the bass voice, in a setting of the Swiss poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. The eerie overtones of the poem suggest that in the traveller’s mind he has not just boarded the last boat of the day, but that he could be crossing the Styx (‘A shadow disembarks and no one boards’). Without stressing the point, Strauss imparts a dark, weary resonance to the song, the three-note figure of ‘O wie süß’ providing the constant motif that propels the music forwards in each bar, and the whole suffused with rich flat-key modulations that emphasize the impenetrable gloom. The song, one of Strauss’s neglected masterpieces, is a perfect vehicle for a singer in possession of a low D flat.

There is nothing in this unassuming Heine setting to suggest that three years separates it from Gefunden, let alone that these were the years that saw the composition and first production of Salome. But it was published together with two further Heine texts, Frühlingsfeier and Die heiligen drei Könige aus Morgenland, the first of which is definitely cut from the same operatic cloth. In melody at least Mit deinen blauen Augen anticipates the classical pastiche of the closing duet in Rosenklavier. (The similarity was apparently not lost on Strauss himself, who on occasion was not above switching mischievously between the two when accompanying his wife.) The setting is simple enough, with the addition of a charming hand-crossing voice in the treble of the piano part, and an expansive sidestep to F sharp major for Heine’s ‘Ein Meer von blauen Gedanken’.

Seven years separate Op 41 and the Heine settings of Op 56, which were composed in 1906. During this interval Strauss composed his first opera Salome, whose dissonant eroticism is echoed in Frühlingsfeier, both in the turbulent arpeggios of the piano part and in the soprano’s grieving cries of ‘Adonis’. The song evokes the springtime Festival of Adonis, held each year in ancient Greece and Western Asia to commemorate the death and rebirth of Adonis as the god of vegetation. Heine ignores the promise of renewal, concentrating on the human tragedy of what he pictures as a bacchic orgy. In this frenzy, the beauty and stillness of Strauss’s transfiguring phrase on ‘Das wunderschöne Jünglingsbild’ stands out as the calm at the eye of the storm.

Heinrich Heine, though Jewish in origin, converted to Christianity at the age of twenty-eight, and this is one of his few poems on a religious subject. Its deliberate naivety is beautifully underscored by the serene diatonicism of Strauss’s setting, the darkness of its C minor opening dispersed by the C major that heralds the arrival of the three kings. Typically, Heine punctures the devout mood with the lowing of the ox and the crying of the holy baby, both graphically depicted by momentary dissonances, but order is quickly restored as the three kings depart singing, to the processional strains of the lengthy postlude. Strictly speaking, this is an orchestral song transcribed for piano, rather than a piano setting later orchestrated, hence rarely if ever performed on the piano. Strauss nevertheless found it worthy of inclusion in the Op 56 songs in this version.